


she who cursed the godly folk

by evewithanapple



Category: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 23:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21064841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Two months into their quest for answers, Stella and Ruth encounter conflicting opinions.





	she who cursed the godly folk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).

They arrive in Salem in January, and frozen grass crunches under Stella’s feet when they step out of the car.

All the Halloween decorations are long gone, the pumpkins rotted with frost, the witches dangling on their broomsticks taken down and replaced with Christmas lights - but Stella can still sense ghosts in the air. Maybe it’s the clapboard houses with their peaked roofs, just what she had pictured when she’d huddled under the covers and read _The House of the Seven Gables_ by flashlight. Maybe it’s the tumbledown graveyard she can see to her right, with weather-worn tombstones tilted at odd angles like bad teeth. Maybe it’s just the _knowing_ what happened here, the misery and injustice of it all soaked so deep into the ground that they can never wash it away.

Ruth shivers beside her in her camel coat. “There’s witches here? Real witches?”

“No.” Stella looks at the graveyard again. Is Bridget Bishop buried there? Bridget Bishop had lingered with her the longest when she’d read about the trials; Bridget and her red bodice. Or Sarah Good and her little girl, poor baby Dorcas going insane in her cell. Or Abigail Hobbs, who’d spun wildly between accused and accuser as she tried to stay alive.

_God will give him blood to drink._

“If there aren’t witches,” Ruth says, “what are we doing here?” She’s rubbing her hands together, Stella notices; her gloves had gotten lost somewhere between Boston and Salem, and her fingers are stiff and red. Stella reaches out to take one of her hands, squeezing it. Ruth offers her a small smile.

“There _weren’t _witches,” Stella says, “not before. But a bunch of people have moved here because of the trials, and some of them can help us. Maybe.” The man they’ve come to see advertised himself in the phone book as a “professional occultist,” a job title Stella suspects he made up himself. But if he knows enough to advertise his services, he might know enough to tell them more about Sarah’s book. _Maybe_. It’s worth a shot.

“That’s the witch house,” she says, pointing as they cross the town square. “It’s where the judge lived, the one who sentenced all the witches. It used to be a few streets over, but they moved it here so there’d be more room.”

“The witch house.” Ruth scrunches up her nose. “But no witches.”

“Not real ones.” Stella feels mildly guilty; she’d spent the bus trip buried in a guidebook, and she could have used the time to explain Salem to Ruth instead. “Just women they accused, because - because they were weird. Or crazy. Or they just didn’t like them.” She looks up at the gables of the Witch House and shivers. If Sarah Bellows had lived a few hundred years earlier, she thinks, would she have been hung here?

“If we’d been alive back then,” she says, “maybe they would have called me a witch, too.”

Ruth looks over at her with a frown. “I’d have stuck up for you, if they did.”

Stella squeezes her hand again.

The man they’ve come to see - LAWRENCE ELEAZAR, PROFESSOR OF THE OCCULT, according to the sign in front of his house - lives just behind the Witch House. His house is at least as old as its neighbours, and there’s a heavy bronze doorknocker shaped like a goat on the front door. Ruth gives it a dubious look, but Stella reaches out with her free hand and gives it three hard knocks. The curtains in the front window twitch, then there’s the sound of footsteps from within, and the door is opened a crack.

Stella clears her throat. “Are you Lawrence Eleazar?”

The crack widens. A nose pokes out, followed by two beady eyes darting underneath tortoiseshell glasses. “I am he,” a reedy voice says. “And you are?”

Stella has to drop Ruth’s hand to rummage in her bag. “My name’s Stella Nicholls. I came to ask you about this book.” She pulls Sarah’s book out of her bag and thrusts it at the door. “It’s occult. For real.”

He emerges from the doorway piece by piece - nose, eyes, high domed forehead and receding hairline - until the whole man is standing on the doorstep, looking down at them. “I suppose you ought to come in, then.”

It’s not the most gracious invitation in the world, but Stella’s willing to take it. Ruth crowds in close to her as they follow Eleazar through the doorway and down the hall, still looking around nervously at the decorations - ugly grinning masks, woodcuts of what Stella assumes are meant to be Black Masses, a shadowbox filled with ornate tarot cards. It’s _supposed_ to be unnerving, Stella, thinks, but it’s . . . not. It’s all too carefully arranged, like the set of a play. Everything here is meant to communicate something, and it’s so obvious that it just leaves her feeling vaguely annoyed. Does he really think his visitors will all be spooked this easily?

“In here.” Eleazar gestures, and Stella and Ruth follow him into a sitting room. Green velvet-upholstered armchairs sit across from a matching couch, and he points them towards the couch before settling into one of the armchairs. “Sit, please.”

They sit. Stella is still holding the book tight against her chest, and Eleazar’s eyes are intent on her. “May I see that manuscript?”

She hands it over. He flips carelessly through a few pages, and Stella digs her fingers into the seat of the couch to keep from snatching it back. “Be careful with it. It’s old.”

He snaps the book shut with a snort. “My dear, it is not. This book clearly does not date any earlier than the nineteen thirties. You may consider fourty years ‘old’, but I assure you, I have handled far more fragile material than this.”

“It’s not from the thirties,” Stella insists. “It’s from the eighteen-nineties. It just looks newer because it’s magic.” That’s what she assumes, anyway. It’s the only reason she can think of why the pages haven’t crumbled under her hands yet. A few years ago, they’d all gone on a class trip to a museum, and the tour guide had explained how they handled the antique papers - always with cotton gloves, replacing the documents back under glass as soon as they were done. Stella’s done none of that, but the book remains in the same slightly tattered condition she found it in.

“Magic, hmm.” Eleazar sets the book down on the coffee table between them. “Perhaps you had better explain the book’s provenance to me.”

So Stella tells him. She outlines the story of Sarah Bellows as quickly as she can, though she wishes she could do it more justice. She promised Sarah she’d tell her story, but she thinks that if she went into detail about the mill and the asylum and the Bellows family, this man might get bored and kick them out. She does make sure to include Auggie and Chuck and Tommy Milner, though out of respect for Ruth, she leaves out the red spot and the spiders.

He listens to it all in silence, a little half-smile playing around his mouth. When she’s done, he sits back in his chair and says, “My dears, someone has spun you a tale.”

Ruth’s forehead crinkles in a frown. “What?”

He gestures at the book. “The type of magic you describe - invoking demons, alchemy performed on the body, travel to other dimensions - is the sort we see practiced by the likes of Aleister Crowley and Allan Kardec. To see it performed so successfully by a madwoman in rural Pennsylvania would be nothing short of a miracle.”

“Invoking demons?” Stella repeats. “Alchemy? What are you talking about?”

“Well, the monsters you describe would certainly be demons,” he says, “summoned from some alternate dimension to guide the magician on his quest for wisdom. And turning that unfortunate boy into a scarecrow - that would be quite the advanced form of alchemy, more powerful than even Crowley managed to accomplish. Even if I believed that this Bellows woman had somehow accessed the basic principles of occultism, the acts you describe would be far beyond her powers.”

“They’re not _demons_,” Stella says, “they’re _monsters_. And Auggie and Chuck - “

“Your friends, yes.” He lowers his glasses, peering at her over the rims. “Clearly banished to some other dimension, although for what purpose I cannot fathom. Not knowing what ritual was performed, it would be difficult to reverse the process. I would suggest - “

“There wasn’t any ritual!” Ruth says shrilly. Bright pink spots have appeared on her cheeks. “They just _disappeared_, okay, nobody cast a - a spell or an alchemy or whatever you think the book is - “

“The book is a fantasy,” he says, maddeningly calm. “The ramblings of a madwoman dreaming of revenge. As I said, whatever else this Bellows woman may have been or done, she most certainly is not responsible for what happened to your friends. It would not have been within her power.”

Stella gapes at him. “Why _not_? Just because people called her crazy? Or because she was a woman?”

“No, not at all.” He tents his fingers beneath his chin. “Rural women have a magic of their own, but it is quite crude. Charms and potions and what-have-you. Primitive practices like that could never affect the kinds of transformations you’ve described. For that, a true, dedicated practitioner is required. I myself have studied in the field for years and never accomplished anything like it. And I _do _consider myself an expert.”

“You’re a _magician_,” Ruth says flatly, disbelieving. “We found you in the _phone book_. You didn’t even see any of this, where do you get off saying she’s wrong?” At “she,” she gestures at Stella. “She actually saw it all happen _and _stopped the ghost, so from where I’m sitting, she’s better at all this than you! What have you ever done besides read other peoples’ books?”

Eleazar is now nearly as pink as Ruth. “I think that’s enough.” He stands. “If you don’t consider my expertise valuable, there’s no reason to prolong this visit any further.”

“No, there sure _isn’t_.” Ruth stands, grabbing Stella’s hand again. Stella barely has time to seize the book from the coffee table before they’re out of the room and down the hall. Eleazar follows them, stiffly angry, and shuts the door with a sharp_ snap_ as soon as they’re out on the stoop.

Ruth is breathing hard when she turns to Stella. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know he could have helped us, but he made me so _mad_.”

Stella shakes her head slowly. “Don’t be sorry,” she says. “He wasn’t going to help.”

Ruth huffs, staring across the town square. “I can’t believe he lives in _Witch City_ and still doesn’t think Sarah Bellows could have done all this.”

Stella follows her gaze. There’s a placard sitting in front of the house across the way, one of those little historical notes they use to introduce the town to tourists. _On this spot in 1692, nineteen men and women were executed . . ._

“There was one woman in the trials,” she says slowly, “who never confessed to anything, even when they took her to be hanged. In court, she told the judge ‘I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.’”

“Gross,” Ruth says. “But fair, I guess.”

“She was executed,” Stella says, “and the judge died twenty-five years later, of a hemorrhage. He choked on his own blood.” It was one of the images that had lingered with her the longest after they’d finished the Salem unit in class. His last, panicked moments, frothing and gargling and trying to breathe through the blood in his mouth. Had he thought of Sarah Good then, in his last moments? She hoped he had. She hoped Ephraim Bellows had thought of Sarah in on his deathbed.

“So . . .” Ruth hesitated. “Was she really a witch after all?”

“Not the kind they said she was,” Stella says. She’s still looking at the plaque. _Unjustly accused and condemned_ . . . “I think, maybe . . . she felt so much, she knew how wrong it was. Her baby died in prison, and her other daughter was locked up for so long that she went insane, and she saw all of it. That stuck somehow, just like it did in Sarah’s book. I don’t know how, but it did.” She jerks her head back towards Eleazar’s house. “I don’t think he knows, either. And he’d never admit it.”

She looks sidelong at Ruth. “You stood up for me in there. You didn’t have to.”

“You stood up for me,” Ruth says simply. “In the hospital. You said you believed me, even though I hadn’t believed you. You were the first person who did.”

She had, it was true. She remembers that first visit, seeing Ruth hunched over in a chair beside the window. How she’d cried when Stella told her about Chuck and promised that they were going to get him back. Then she’d stomped back into the waiting room and shouted herself hoarse at the doctors, _she’s not crazy! She’s got the scar, you can see she’s not crazy! You can’t call her crazy just because you don’t like what she has to say!_ until security had frog-marched her out of the building.

It hadn’t actually done any good; all she’d achieved with that scene was being banned from the mental hospital. It had been her dad who’d gotten Ruth out, going to the Steinbergs and talking them into signing a release to let Ruth out. Stella hadn’t really done anything but yell; but she had to. She wasn’t going to see Ruth end up like Sarah Bellows.

“Of course I did,” she says. “I knew you were right.”

“Yeah,” Ruth says, “and I know you’re right now.” She looks down at their hands, still entwined against the cold. “Do you think there’s anyplace in Salem that sells gloves?”

“I bet there are,” Stella says. “You want to buy some before we catch the bus back to Boston?”

Ruth considers for a moment, then shakes her head. “Nah,” she says. “I’m good.” She holds their hands up. “We can just keep doing this until we get back to the city.”

And even though it’s cold, and the sky is grey, and they just went on a useless trip to see someone who couldn’t help them at all, Stella feels a rush of warmth from her fingers down to the tips of her toes. “I’d like that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sarah Good, her daughter Dorcas, and Nicholas Noyes were all very real people who lived in Salem in 1692. Stella's recounting of events is more or less correct: Sarah was executed, Dorcas (who was four at the time) went insane in prison, and Noyes died of a hemorrhage as Sarah had predicted. Likewise, Abigail Hobbs and Bridget Bishop were both accused in the trials; Abigail confessed (and accused others) and survived, Bridget refused and was hanged. Aleister Crowley and Allan Kardec were also both real occultists who lived in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and wrote extensively on their respective belief systems (Thelema and Spiritism.) I doubt either of them would be able to make much headway with Sarah Bellows.
> 
> Title is from Mary Elizabeth Counselman's poem "Witch-Burning," which can be read online [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32493/32493-h/32493-h.htm). "She set her mark upon that throng / For time can not erase / The echo of her anguished cries, / The memory of her face."


End file.
